Here are my Top 10 watches for GPS accuracy that have so far managed to complete my standard test route. I have a 10 mile test route (16.6km) for accuracy of my GPS devices following a known track. It covers very many different types of environmental hazards to GPS accuracy such as buildings, trees and…
The new London 10 mile race is in Richmond Park on June 4 2017 on a car-free day. It’s not flat. That’s 16km of fun in prep for your marathon or HIM/IM. It is significantly harder than 10km for most people, especially if you are relatively new to running. A good challenge. June should be…
Important swim news !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! FYI: The band is only £10. I guess the success will depend on the number of venues and whether or not race times clash with general open sessions. —-reproduced from triathlonbusiness.com Modelling on the hugely successful Parkrun format of free 5K run events across the UK, NOWCA, the UK’s National Open…
I knew something was wrong when the autolaps were quite a bit different from each other. With the new gps algorithm, with GLONASS enabled, and with firmware v1.6.14, I re-did my standard GPS test for the Spartan Ultra and the Spartan Sport I followed this methodology and this precise, standard route: https://the5krunner.com/courses/test-route-for-gps-devices/. That link also has all the…
Most of us will appreciate that one of the keys to staying injury free as runners is to keep on-top of the various strength and mobility exercises that build our bodies to be able to withstand the demands that come with running mile-after-mile in training.
Today’s new firmware for the SPARTAN is annoying as I now have to re-do a GPS test I did last week 🙂 although hopefully this line from the Suunto update notes “This update also brings a new GPS firmware to improve general tracking accuracy” suggests that the test might be worth re-doing and will find increased…
I was looking for AndroidWear sports apps for the Polar M600. I found a few and some were even interesting! Although there was not too much to tempt me away from the POLAR app that is inbuilt into the M600. Then I stumbled across swim.com (ios and android and other platforms) and the chart to the…
HTC are rumoured to have produced a new device in conjunction with Under Armour (UA). Leveraging on some work in 2016 with the UA ‘Healthbox’ they may now poised to jointly release an AndroidWear smartwatch. Other sources (wareable) suggest the co-operative venture is DEAD! Here are some images of the sports watch (Source: Androidpolice.com) showing AndroidWear…
After a recent post “Rant 2016: The Problem with sports watch reviews; freebies and bloggers”, I started to think a bit more about the issues of the INDEPENDENCE of bloggers in the sports gadget market. We all have our favourite blogs, I’m no exception. Some of my favourite blogs claim to be independent; others, to me, don’t…
Last year Shimano gave us performance cycling footwear and this year the natural expansion is to performance clothing for cycling. There seem to be some fabled ‘marginal gains’ from saving some energy by reducing friction. These are probably minimal but, hey, the clothing looks nice. There are probably more serious performance gains from aerodynamic drag…
Another interesting acquisition announced a few days ago by Fitbit. this time of the European ‘startup’ VECTOR. To me it looks like a similar acquisition to the PEBBLE deal. Maybe VECTOR have watches in the planning stages…either way existing watches will not be updated further. Again Fitbit seem to have made the acquisition of apps a…
Some of you will be data-driven athletes. You will use your historic or live data to actively work on areas of improvement. This is GREAT. And you should continue with that approach if you want to. There might be a danger, however, in becoming the data-laden athlete. You can guess what that means easily enough: so…
Garmin’s Fenix 5 advertises the use of Training Effect 2.0 and will also be including a new Training Status. This was developed by FIRSTBEAT and announced as long ago as December 2015. As we know FIRSTBEAT are a leading HR-analytics company who partner with Suunto, Huawei, Jabra, Samsung, Sony and others. Indeed many of you…
This was my novelty pick of CES 2016, or at least the previous F10 version was. The previous version was rugged, had androidwear and a dual-layer LCD: one monochrome & one colour. The Nixon Mission then seemed to be a bit like this ie a bit like the WSD-F10. Now we have the snappily named WSD-F20 (no…
The GoMore Stamina sensor is a nifty Bluetooth heart rate monitor device that pairs with an iOS 8+ or Android 4.4+ smartphone app. The app purports to tell you how much stamina you have left – it helps you pace yourself. During exercise it gives you 3 key bits of information: percent stamina remaining; percent aerobic…
With the Fenix 5, the killer “app” will be MAPS and the gargantuan, cumulative effect of a shed-load of individually-trivial functionality. Think about it though… In the market for devices for casual runners, this MAPPING feature is worthless. So there are lots of different killer functions and apps for sports watches depending on the segment targeted.…
I hope you are enjoying the spoon-fed news from CES as much as the rest of us, relishing in the joys of re-announcements of Garmin CIQ apps from a few months ago and hand-held emergency satellite thingies for when you are next in the Amazon. The ‘best’ news was the ‘news’ that in 6 months there…
fitbit have relatively basic but generally well-working products. Their online ecosystem is good. In the light of new competitor products, FITBIT have announced further additions to their online offering – press release below In my opinion some of these online platforms and apps (eg Under Armour) are getting WAY too complicated. I do complex stuff…
Polar have just announced a new HRM. The H10. This is probably a renamed H7i ie the late-2016 model we were expecting. Indeed this may well dash hopes of what the H7i might have been. however it does have an inbuilt but currently inactive accelerometer (Source: FCC) and maybe it could have a bridging function (unknown).…
When you have a super large company partnering like SAMSUNG with a super large company like UNDER ARMOUR then it’s gonna work right? Looks like a great move with Under Armour porting their apps over to Samsung’s AndroidWear platform doesn’t it? Except Samsung ISN’T AndroidWear. It’s TIZEN (prev RTOS) – it’s proprietary OS. Just like…
